When Rui Umezawa, 45, met his wife, Linda, at the University of Alberta in the early 1980s, the fact that he is Japanese and she isn’t barely entered his mind.

“It’s something that I really didn’t think about. . . . For me personally, I just met my wife and fell in love with her, and we got married and that was that,” said Mr. Umezawa, who lives in Toronto and whose 2002 novel, The Truth About Death and Dying, draws on his experiences as a Japanese immigrant.